Wednesday, September 20, 2006

As long ago as 1930, T.S. Eliot said, Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments As you can boast in the way of polite societyWill hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?from “Choruses from ‘The Rock.’”VI

I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. T.S. Eliota famous BBC broadcast to a defeated Germany in 1945 by the poet T.S. Eliot.

"I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it." (emphasis added) (p. 122)